Hotel merch is dead.
Good morning everyone. I hope you’re all having an amazing day.
NEWS:
When I was in Montauk over the weekend, I saw over 15 adults wearing hats ($32, trucker) from Amber Waves. You used to have to go to the Amagansett farm stand to get a hat, which was a corny signal that you either go to or have been to the Hamptons. But now you can order the hats online without ever stepping foot on the LIRR platform. This morning, Bloomberg published a story about luxe hotel merch. I asked wealth-expert
what he thought of this story, and he said “This reminds me of people taking pictures in a stage set of a private plane. From the article: 'hotel swag gives off a sort of “if-you-know-you-know” quality.' No it does not. If you go to these places frequently, you know it's cheesy to wear the labeled merch outside of the hotel or resort." Some hotels, like The Sunset Tower in Los Angeles, only sell their merch in-person. A friend told me that the other day he saw someone wearing a Rising Sun hat which is cool as hell. But back to the hotels mentioned in the story… setting up a quick Shopify site and finding a reliable 3PL is a great way to rack up some extra bucks during the off-season.Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions is collaborating with Braindead. Unclear if this is a merch collab, or a creepy Halloween screening series at Braindead’s Fairfax theater, or an original production, but I’ll be buying whatever they sell.
Speaking of creepy, Yeti and Liquid Death made a coffin cooler that you can bet on. Highest bet is currently $37k. I like how hard the committed to it, and I think this is a fun marketing moment — so much more effective and less wasteful than sending 100 influencers a cardboard box of paper collateral and useless t-shirts.
Graza is creating olive oil flavored gelato with Talenti. Perhaps at the US Open considering that tennis graphic?
Alo came out with their first running shoe — they’re $185. In an interview with Glossy, Danny Harris, Alo’s founder and CEO, compared the brand to Apple. “Apple comes out with a product, and they put everything behind it. It’s the same idea for us. … When we come out with another shoe, it will be a different kind of shoe, in a category that we’re addressing very seriously and are really excited about.”
Eater listed a job for a New York reporter this week
“In our current cultural landscape it is difficult for white writers to talk about race in their work for fear of getting it wrong or the work being deemed “political”, but we all live and are writing in the same context and that reality makes its way to the page, regardless of pains taken to hide it.”
has a new series called In Theory, where she unpacks and discusses critical texts.Red Antler (whose client list includes Popup Bagels, Casper, Allbirds and Chime) has been quietly building a venture arm called Habitat Partners. Per the article, their investing practice grew out of their earlier practice of taking sweat equity in the DTC companies that they worked on branding for. Sometimes I think of the sweat equity checks given out from 2012-2016 and how brand designers and web designers for Hinge/Harry’s/Sweetgreen/Warby ended up with real participation in the upside (and real nest eggs). If you know a web designer with a tricked out Ford Bronco in Malibu, sweat equity bucks might’ve paid for it. Past performance is no guarantee of future results and it remains to be seen if Red Antler’s 2024 vintage of seed investments can perform as well as their earliest (stacked) basket of sweat equity. But there are still few people who I’d trust to invest in consumer at the idea stage — when basically the vibe and founder are what you’d invest in — more than Red Antler.
A brilliant deep-dive of noise complaints related to ice cream trucks on the Upper West Side (2022 was the worst).
I really need a better understanding on why everyone is having such an awful time dating. From changing your location on dating apps just to “feel something” to claiming straight men are bad conversationalists, it’s either an absolute minefield out there or these stories perform really well with traffic. I did a chat about this on Substack a while ago, but we can take it to the comment section today.
- on working at Goldman Sachs, leaving her job at Glossier, and building Ghia.
The future of fragrance is subtlety. And if that is interesting to you, you should listen to the new episode of Founders about Estee Lauder.
See you tomorrow!
My hot take in re dating is: I think these stories of it being horrible perform well because it keeps our ego protected. “Im not the problem, the dating scene is. There’s nothing else I can do to be a more attractive potential partner—I don’t need to heal my own insecurities, attachment wounds, shadow, or bad habits that might subconsciously push people away.” I think that yes, dating apps have played into us commodifying each other and stuff. I think it probably is materially worse for people than it was even fifteen years ago. And I do think that we are worse at socializing now because of the pandemic. But if I want my own dating life to be better…does it not start with me? I have way more control over my own self than the entire category of dating writ large. This is also why I engage with those kinds of stories less often now. I don’t want them to reinforce whatever “woe is me I’ll be alone forever” neural pathway is still sitting there in my silly little pink brain.
Tbh I think dating apps just got too…professional? Tinder circa 2014 was a hot mess but sooo fun. Now everyone has their profile down to a science, there’s tons of bots, and you get the sense the apps actively don’t want you to find someone. It’s tipped into the uncanny corporate valley, and feels kinda gross